Setting Realistic Expectations For Your SEO Campaign

It can be a big disappointment when any marketing campaign you execute does not get the desired return on investment. With SEO, this problem is typical among small business owners because they read all the hype and believe they can do a bit of SEO for huge floods of traffic. Unfortunately, the reality is a lot different. It is not as easy as it sounds to get a reliable source of traffic from the search engines. Nevertheless, it isn’t all bad. You can make a success of your business through SEO. You just need to use the right approach and set your expectations at the correct levels.

Go For The Right Keywords

A lot of people doing SEO without much knowledge go to their keyword tool of choice find the keywords that get the most searches in their niche and target those. Unfortunately, this is very naive because those keywords will already be very well optimized for by the big players in that niche. That means to outrank them a lot of money needs to be spent, and that is something that small business owners don’t have a lot of. It is a far more realistic strategy to go after the long tail keywords. After all, the recent Google Hummingbird update has ensured that long tail keywords have search pages that are of better quality. The thing is there are so many long tail keywords that the competition cannot realistically target all of them. This means for very minimal SEO you can get top rankings for them. An expert from Search Engine Watch explains the increased popularity of long tail keywords:

But not only do long-tail keywords still work, we’re in the midst of a strong resurgence of their value. They continue to be a powerful way to leverage search traffic, especially with the growing competition around highly-sought after core (or “head”) keywords.

SEO Takes Time

Another aspect of SEO that new business owners get discouraged with is the amount of time that it all takes. If you don’t have patience and faith in SEO then you are doomed from the start, because this is a venture where only perseverance will bring rewards. There was a time when you could build thousands of links in the space of a week and get the rewards for it. Nowadays, the natural slower approach is the safer one because an unnaturally fast increase in links will not look good. In fact, it can reduce those links to worthless value if Google suspects that you have manually engineered those links.

There are some services where a tier system is used to create links, but even that is not the answer for quick rankings. So from the beginning have the mindset that it will take a lot of time and you will have the motivation to stick with it.

You Don’t Have Control

What a lot of website owners find frustrating is that there isn’t a lot of control when it comes to SEO. You literally just do what you can in terms of considering the different onsite and offsite optimization factors and then hope for the best. Chris Sparks from Search Engine Journal explains this point further:

No one but the search engines have control over the SEO landscape. What you do have control over is how you respond to the changes. Good information from good systems and SEO know-how is often the difference between “sink” and “swim” when it comes to the business you conduct online.

For that reason you shouldn’t invest all of your marketing budget into SEO. Set some funds aside for social media and PPC, because that way if your organic traffic goes missing you still have other ones to rely on.